there's our catastrophe

Jan 22 2013

monetizeyourcat:

thegreensage:

stefanhayden:

This is Rear Admiral Grace Hopper. She worked for UNIVAC in 1949 who made some of the first computers ever. In 1951 she discovered the first computer “bug.”. In 1952 she had an operational compiler. “Nobody believed that,” she said. “I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. They told me computers could only do arithmetic.”You might not know what a compiler is, but it’s the reason you have an Operating System with programs on or a phone with apps. There would be no Windows or Apple or facebook or twitter or tumblr without her.Today 14% of engineers are female. Some thing when wrong. Grace Hopper is a BAMF and more people should know.

GRACE HOOPER ROCKS!!!

personality tests were developed in the 60s in response to widespread unease in academia and the research industry with how many programmers and computer operators were women; the modern image of the programmer as having male-leaning antisocial traits was basically developed by HR managers during the johnson administration
when grace hopper was young she was basically typical of her profession and now people like her are systematically excluded

thegreensage:

stefanhayden:

This is Rear Admiral Grace Hopper. She worked for UNIVAC in 1949 who made some of the first computers ever. In 1951 she discovered the first computer “bug.”. In 1952 she had an operational compiler. “Nobody believed that,” she said. “I had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. They told me computers could only do arithmetic.”

You might not know what a compiler is, but it’s the reason you have an Operating System with programs on or a phone with apps. There would be no Windows or Apple or facebook or twitter or tumblr without her.

Today 14% of engineers are female. Some thing when wrong. Grace Hopper is a BAMF and more people should know.

GRACE HOOPER ROCKS!!!

personality tests were developed in the 60s in response to widespread unease in academia and the research industry with how many programmers and computer operators were women; the modern image of the programmer as having male-leaning antisocial traits was basically developed by HR managers during the johnson administration

when grace hopper was young she was basically typical of her profession and now people like her are systematically excluded

(via memejacker)

Dec 7 2012

“In South Africa, jealous white women decided that freed women, by their dress and manner, had become “unseemly and vexing to the public” and in 1765 they were forbidden to wear “colored silk clothing, hoopskirts, fine laces, adorned bonnets, curled hair or earrings.” One can understand the vexation over silks, but forbidding a mulatto to walk in public with her hair in curls a hundred fifty years before the invention of the straightening iron was an early and ominous indication of the white South African talent for fine-tuned racial sadism.” orlando patterson, “slavery and social death”

Nov 21 2012

ahipstory:

great t-shirt

“The claim that Facebook and Twitter were the keys to the Arab Spring were attempts to capture revolutionary energies within the logic of communicative capitalism. They try to tell us that anything that is radical is in fact predictable and part of what we already have. In other words, they are totally reactionary attempts to assert the primary of capitalism at precisely a moment when it is under significant threat.” — not bad either

Nov 14 2012

“A Malaysian investment brochure advertises “the oriental girl,” for example, as “qualified by nature and inheritance to contribute to the efficiency of a bench assembly production line” (FIDA 1975). This biological rationale for the commodification of women’s bodies is a part of a pervasive discourse reconceptualizing women for high-tech production requirements. Japanese managers in the free-trade zone talk about the “eyesight,” ”manual dexterity,” and “patience” of young women to perform tedious micro-assembly jobs. An engineer put the female nature-technology relationship in a new light: “Our work is designed for females.”

“the production of possession: spirits and the multinational corporation in Malaysia”, aihwa ong, 1987 (read in full)

I pretty much always want to talk about women’s bodies under capitalism but not in a stupid reductive “advertising gives girls low self-esteem” way that positions women as only ever consumers rather than producers/workers; such an analysis is itself misogynist. apparently this article is a bit of a modern classic? it’s about spirit possession and assembly-line workers in 1980s Malaysia. currently putting together a reading list on the alienation of women’s labour, how this is accomplished through distinctly gendered/embodied means, and the interference of the supernatural with this process.

(via)

Nov 7 2012

tanacetum-vulgare:

I just wanted to revive this post to show Americans that this is what a proper election ballot looks like. It’s paper, you mark an X or a check next to the candidate you like, you fold it up along the creases that are already creased for you, so no one can see your vote and thus no one can try to repress it, then you go and stick it in a cardboard box.

This is literally all it takes up here in the land of Parliamentary democracy. It’s that easy.

we use exclusively paper ballots in Australia as well, and they don’t even have those creases. voter fraud and suppression at the actual polling booth seem to be virtually non-existent. (there are some concerns with various governments changing the day the electoral rolls close to whatever gives them the most political advantage, plus your usual gerrymandering and shit, that’s where the issues lie.)

I think there is something really interesting about all this faith in voting machines. some myth-of-progress, Enlightenment mentality, technocratic reasoning thing. People really seem to think that if something is as symbolically removed as possible from the human and familiar, it is above human agendas, even above the material world in some way.

apparently there was a strong movement for an actual technocracy (government by experts in “technology”, in this case scientists and engineers) in the USA in the 1930s. I wonder how much of the prevalence of voting machines in the US is a hangover from that movement?

Nov 2 2012

fluvicoline replied to your post: so-calledwife replied to your post: This is…

i’ve gotta say that having the comp-sci kids implement the designers’ projects seems fucked. like if you’re just a computer nerd and not a “creative” protoprofessional then clearly your skills are of purely instrumental value, right? wrong.

I agree. like, at least have them collaborate in some way? although in this context comp sci kids are the technicians implementing another’s designs, they are themselves designers, just not necessarily visual designers.

Oct 28 2012

(via windows95tips)

Sep 23 2012

katydidnot:

visions-and-revisions:

lambofomg:

inspired—motivated:

CVdazzle, a fashion movement designed to distort your facial features allowing you to hide in plain sight from electronic surveillance cameras. Hello cyber-fashion.

“CV Dazzle opposes the mainstream push towards the widespread adoption of face recognition in order to protect privacy. As the usefulness and popularity of facial recognition grows in commerce and security (currently it’s the fastest growing sector of biometrics ), so will the value of privacy. The objective of CV Dazzle is to adapt to our new environment and explore ways of communicating with machines to control our privacy in public.”

INTERESTING.

you guys this looks like some serious capital fashion to me

that is some pretty dodgy hair. I’m into this “mimicking butterflies and their fake eyes” makeup, though. NATURE IS CULTURE

Mar 14 2012

'Blunt display of unselfconscious gall': homeless people paid to carry wi-fi signals

A charitable marketing program that paid homeless people to carry wi-fi signals at South By Southwest has drawn widespread debate at the annual Austin conference and around the country.

BBH Labs, a unit of the global marketing agency BBH, gave 13 people from Austin’s Front Steps Shelter mobile Wi-Fi devices and T-shirts that announced “I am a 4G Hotspot.” The company paid them $20 up front and a minimum of $50 a day for about six hours work, said Emma Cookson, chairwoman of BBH New York.

dude

apart from anything else, that’s not even a living wage

Jan 11 2012

curmudgeonlaine:

kenyatta:

You Need To Learn How To Program

via Slate:

If you’re looking for a New Year’s resolution, let me suggest an idea that you might not have considered: You should learn computer programming. Specifically, you should sign up for Code Year, a new project that aims to teach neophytes the basics of programming over the course of 2012. Code Year was put together by Codecademy,* a startup that designs clever, interactive online tutorials. Codecademy’s founders, Zach Sims and Ryan Bubinski, argue that everyone should know how to program—that learning to code is becoming as important as knowing how to read and write. I concur. So if you don’t know how to program, why not get started this week? Come on, it’ll be fun!

Code Year’s minimum commitment is one new lesson every week. The company says that it will take a person of average technical skill about five hours to complete a lesson, so you’re looking at about an hour of training every weekday. That’s not so bad, considering that the lessons are free, and the reward could be huge: If you’re looking to make yourself more employable (or more immune from getting sacked), if you’d like to become more creative at work and in the rest of your life, and if you can’t resist a good intellectual challenge, there are few endeavors that will pay off as handsomely as learning to code.

oo hm

hmm. they make a good case.

(via novazembla)

there's our catastrophe

work is its own cure. you have to like it better than being loved. ⚑ ♀

'Blunt display of unselfconscious gall': homeless people paid to carry wi-fi signals

You Need To Learn How To Program

work is its own cure. you have to like it better than being loved.

⚑ ♀